Videssence’s new Vidnel 100 LED Fresnel uses a 100 W lamp that can replace a 1,000 W conventional quartz fixture.

SEATTLE—Visitors to recent NAB or IBC
shows have witnessed many new developments
in the manufacturing of professional
lighting equipment and fixture designs.
Some of these supposedly new designs are
just packaging, but there’s a lot R&D going
on in the lighting arena as well.

Where some lighting professionals have
been happy with the quality of light they
were getting from traditional tungsten,
HMI and fluorescent fixtures, they have
asked for features that come only with
LED lighting equipment.

“Within the family
of products we make in the fluorescent
line, we’ve added LEDs over time,” said
Scott Stueckle, sales and public relations
manager at Kino Flo Lighting Systems in
Burbank, Calif.

Kino Flo’s target was to design LED fixtures
with the same quality of light, soft
and diffuse, as its fluorescent banks, but
with the long bulb life of LEDs. “And you
also have low energy and color selection
you can choose just by dialing in your color
temperature, what color you need for
the shot,” Stueckle said, adding that new
cameras and lenses have driven the direction
of this technology.

“A lot of people are tending more toward
soft lighting because you get a lot of
graduated density out of a soft light, from
maybe very soft to a harder quality of soft
light, and that shows up pretty dramatically
in HD camera technology,” Stueckle said.

NEW CHIP DESIGN
Videssence is another pioneering fluorescent
lighting fixture maker that cut its
teeth in the energy-efficient television and
video conference lighting business. Gary
Thomas, national sales manager said the El
Monte, Calif.-based company began with
fixtures using multiple LED chips for soft
lights, similar to their fluorescent bank
lights.

Zylight’s new F8 LED Fresnel can be powered by a worldwide AC power adapter or a standard 14.4V camera battery.

“LED technology has been changing
rapidly,” he said. “Now that there is a powerful
single source LED chip about the
size of a quarter, we have a new Fresnel
fixture that is a 100 W lamp that will replace
a 1,000 W conventional quartz fixture.
Color temperature, CRI rating, everything
has gotten so much better with that
technology.”

Thomas said the new Fresnel LED fixture
fulfills an important lighting need. “With
multiple source LED lights, you couldn’t
do shadow contouring, barn doors would
not work properly, you would have multiple
shadows and shadow imaging.” Internally,
the lensing and focusing mechanism
is identical to legacy Fresnel fixtures. “It’s a
fixture that looks like old technology but
it’s powered by new technology and uses
a tenth the electricity.”

The energy efficiency in both power
draw and reduction in air conditioning
needs are well-known characteristics of
LED lighting, and are often touted when
compared to the tungsten fixtures they
replace in a studio. Litepanels, a Van Nuys,
Calif.-based lighting vendor, cites a recent
customer who found sizable infrastructure
cost savings where a direct comparison
was possible.

Station group Griffin Communications
was planning to build a new Tulsa home for
CBS affiliate KOTV, but they updated their
plans when LED lighting because a viable
alternative, according to Chris Marchitelli,
vice president for global marketing for the
Vitec Group, parent company of Litepanels.
“Redesigning the studios for LED lights
instead of a tungsten and fluorescent mix
provided them with a real-world apples-to-apples comparison,” Marchitelli said.
“There was quite a ripple effect.”

The reduction in heat load meant smaller
air conditioning ducting, which allowed
lower studio ceilings, which required less
steel. That meant less overall weight, which
also allowed a reduction in concrete in the
foundation. “It was a substantial savings,
above and beyond the ongoing energy savings,”
said Marchitelli.

SAVING SPACE
“Run and gun” is a way of life for many
videographers, whether for TV news or
other work. “Their crews, if they have
them, are getting smaller and their budgets
are shrinking,” said Charlie Collias, director
of sales at Zylight in Hillsboro, Ore. “They
need good lighting that they can put up
quickly and easily.”

This led Zylight to incorporate features
like variable color temperature, variable
color correction, full color output and
wireless controls in their lighting products.
“We have come out with a very space saving
design, compact, a very small case that
saves money on baggage fees when traveling,” Collias said. “It’s also weatherproof to
protect the lights when the weather turns
nasty.”

Zylight has also future-proofed its fixtures.
“The lights are upgradable, so you
can use them for years without worrying
about them going out of style. You can
mount a brighter module inside when one
comes to market. So the users that we find
are looking for small, compact instruments
with a lot of features.”

K5600’s Joker Bug 200

Traditional LED fixtures rely on phosphors
that are applied right on the LED
bulb. Remote phosphor technology separates
the phosphors from the LEDs. BBS
Lighting places the LEDs behind a remote
polycarbonate phosphorized diffuser on
its Area 48 lighting fixture.

Ken Fisher, director of lighting for BBS
Lighting, points to some of the advantages
for remote phosphor technology in LED
lighting. “There are a lot of the inherent
problems with the traditional LED construction
that go away when you move to
the remote phosphor approach,” he said.
“One is that applying the phosphors on
the bulb itself is a precision task, where applying
them to a much larger remote location
is easier to manufacture and results in
more consistency.”

Putting some distance between the
LEDs and the phosphors also reduces the
damage heat does to the phosphors. And in
BBS’s Area 48 design, with the phosphors
applied to a removable diffuser, different
diffusers with different phosphor coatings
can be used to achieve various color outputs.

HMI AND PLASMA
HMI lighting technology premiered decades
ago and still has an important place
in providing continuous spectrum, powerful
daylight illumination in a variety of
form factors. Location lighting fixture provider
K5600 touts a major advance with
its new 3200K discharge lamps that can
be easily changed out with HMI 5600K
lamps.

“There have been ways in the past
where you’ve been able to unplug and
change out different components,” said
Ryan Smith, president of K5600 USA in
North Hollywood, Calif. “But this will be
the first time where you can just swap
bulbs and still get a highly efficient lighting
instrument with the appropriate color
temperature for all practical purposes on
the set.”

The ballast and other electronics will
remain the same regardless of which bulb
is used. “So for all our existing fixtures on
the market—200, 400, 800 W fixtures—
you’ll be able to swap lamps and get a
3200K color at the same efficiencies that
HMIs are currently producing; four or five
times as efficient as a tungsten lamp.”

While most of the buzz in lighting technology
has been around LED light sources,
there’s a new kid on the block in the form
of plasma bulbs. Jon Miller, founder and
CTO for Los Angeles-based Hive Lighting
explained how plasma lighting works: “We
put a small amount of gas in a quartz capsule,
and basically microwave it. That produces
a plasma state, and that produces a
ton of photons, a lot of light from a small
point source.”

He said the quality of the daylight-balanced
light produced is different from the
discontinuous, or spiky spectrum from
LEDs. “It provides with a full spectrum
light, with the spike in the yellow arc,
much more like direct sunlight, as opposed
to spiking in the green that you’ll see in
HMIs, and in certain fluorescents and
LEDs,” he said.

The fact that all the light comes from
a small glass capsule makes it possible to
use classic Fresnel and parabolic optical
designs to operate as daylight sources with
the plasma bulbs, roughly doubling the
output of an HMI fixture with equivalent
wattage. Today Hive has one plasma bulb
size, 275 W. But Miller said they will expand
to a range of bulbs, very much like present
HMI fixture makers have.

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